The Commons?

The Queen Street Commons is organized to serve the common good of its members.

We come together to create the organizational power to obtain services in common that we could never afford on our own. We offer fellowship and community for those that work alone. We offer the opportunity to discover the value of interacting with others. We offer the opportunity to contribute to the common good. We offer a “Work Home”.

While the tangible services we offer are in themselves valuable, we hope that membership will confer a deeper value that is not easy to quantify. We hope that membership will offer opportunity, growth and influence.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, at the dawn of business, everyone worked at home. People found it convenient to spend the day in the close company of others who shared their common interests. One of the first venues was Lloyds Coffee House. Friends aggregated into booths and then into partnerships with each other. Those who wanted to do business with these “syndicates” wandered around the floor. From this simple beginning arose the world’s most effective insurance business.

Today more and more of us also work from home. While the Internet offers us some community, we can feel isolated and we often find the costs of basic infrastructure expensive. In addition, we miss by our social isolation, the synchronicity of opportunity that arises from meeting regularly in person. Many of us also work in sectors, and on ideas, that are still in their infancy. We are therefore vulnerable to the no-sayers and to the mainstream. This type of work needs the protection of social space where we develop amongst ourselves the trust, the community and ultimately the power, to take these ideas into the light of day.

Our Norms

Membership of the Commons is therefore different from membership in a regular club or organization.

Members of the Commons understand that making a commons work requires us to take no more than is sustainable for the other members.

Members treat others as adults and expect to be treated as adults themselves.

In practice this means that we take our big copy jobs outside Commons,

That we use the meeting room in the knowledge that others might wish to use it as well.

It means that now and then we bring in some coffee.

It means that when another is being more selfish than is acceptable, that you call them on it.

The Commons takes us back to a time when we took responsibility for both ourselves and for the greater good of the whole. The Commons is a space where relationships are not positional but real. The Commons takes us back “home”; to where people feel most comfortable and productive.

The Commons will not therefore have a long list of rules but will operate on a set of social norms of good behaviour. Should disputes arise, the Council will settle them.

Here are the Kindergarten Guidelines/Norms that we take very seriously:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.

Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.